Текст книги "Spartan Gold"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Clive Cussler
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

They stopped short.

Remi murmured, “Sam . . .”

“I see them.”

Caught in their headlamps, the Karyatids lay side by side on the floor, their golden faces staring at the ceiling. Sam and Remi walked forward and knelt down.

Cast with immaculate care, the women’s golden torsos were draped in robes so finely detailed Sam and Remi could see tiny creases and stitching. On each woman’s head rested a laurel wreath; each stem and leaf and bud was a work of art unto itself.

“Who moved them?” Remi said. “Laurent? How could he have done it by himself?”

“That,” Sam replied, then pointed.

Lying beside the wall was a makeshift sled constructed of a half dozen overlapping shields. Made of lacquered wicker and leather, each shield was a five-foot-tall hourglass. They were bound together with what looked like catgut to form a shallow canoe shape.

“We saw one of these at Bondaruk’s estate,” Sam said. “It’s a Persian gerron. Imagine it: Laurent, in here working alone for days, building his sled, then dragging each Karyatid across that bridge. . . . Amazing.”

“But why leave them here?”

“I don’t know. We know there’s a gap in his biography a few years before he hired Arienne and the Faucon. Maybe Napoleon ordered him to try to get the columns out. Maybe Laurent realized he couldn’t do it without help, so he left them behind assuming he’d return.”

“Sam, daylight.”

He looked up. Remi had moved farther down the wall and was kneeling beside a shoulder-wide crack in the wall. The interior had collapsed and was choked with rock. A pencil-sized shaft of sunlight showed at the far end.

“Napoleon and Laurent might have come in this way,” Remi said, “but we won’t be using it to get out.”

“Time to go,” Sam said. “Let’s go get reinforcements.”

They found another opening, this one barely larger than the slit they’d come through earlier. At the other end was an alcove and another side tunnel, this one leading back in the general direction of the main cavern. For twenty minutes they picked their way along until finally they reached an intersection. To the left they heard the sound of rushing water.

“The waterfall,” Remi said.

They crept down the tunnel to the mouth, stopping a few feet short. Directly across from them lay the dragon’s-teeth curtain; to the left, the platform. They could just make out the glow of Sam’s chem light on the wall behind the barrel stalactite.

“I don’t see anyone,” Sam said.

“Me neither.”

They started across the cavern, angling toward the platform.

Sam saw the movement in the corner of his eye a split second before the gun roared. The bullet struck the stalactite beside Sam’s hip. He ducked. Beside him, Remi spun, took aim on the charging figure, and snapped off a shot. The figure spun and fell, but almost rolled onto his side and started to rise.

“Run!” Sam barked. “That way!”

With Remi in the lead they sprinted for the dragon’s teeth, through the gap, and onto the water-slick bridge. Never slowing, Remi crashed through the waterfall, followed by Sam. When they reached the far ledge Remi kept going, ducking into the tunnel, but Sam skidded to a stop and turned back.

“Sam!”

Through the waterfall he could see a figure running across the bridge. Sam dropped the Xiphos and the spear, scooped up a double handful of gravel, and tossed it across the bridge. A second later the figure crashed through the waterfall, his gun extended before him. His lead foot skidded over the gravel and shot out from under him. Eyes wide, his arms windmilling, he stumbled backward, his face upturned into the waterfall. He slammed back first onto the bridge. His leg slipped over the edge and he scrambled with his opposite leg, trying to find purchase. Then he was gone, screaming as he tumbled into the crevasse.

Remi appeared at Sam’s shoulder. He picked up the spear, then stood up and turned toward her. “Two down, two to—”

“Too late for that,” a voice said. “Don’t move a muscle.”

Sam pivoted his head. Surrounded by billowing mist, Kholkov stood on the bridge in front of the waterfall. His nine-millimeter Glock was pointed at them.

Remi whispered, “I’ve got one more bullet. They’re going to kill us anyway.”

“True,” Sam murmured.

Kholkov barked, “Stop talking. Fargo, step away from your wife.”

Sam turned his body slightly, still covering Remi’s gun hand as he very slowly extended the spear toward Kholkov. Instinctively the Russian’s eyes flicked toward the spearhead. Remi didn’t miss the moment. Instead of raising the .357 to shoulder height, she simply lifted it to waist level and pulled the trigger.

A neat hole appeared in Kholkov’s sternum; a red stain spread across the front of his sweater. He collapsed to his knees and gaped at Sam and Remi. Sam saw Kholkov’s gun hand twitch, saw the Glock start to rise. Spear held before him, Sam charged onto the bridge. Kholkov’s fading reflexes were no match for the spear’s seven-foot reach. The steel head plunged into Kholkov’s chest, then out his back. Sam leaned forward, wrenched the Glock from Kholkov’s hand, then planted his feet and gave the spear a twist. Kholkov tumbled over the side. Sam stepped to the edge and watched him spin out of sight.

Remi walked up. “Couldn’t have happened to a nastier person.”

Back in the cavern, they picked their way through the stalactites, frequently checking behind and to the sides on their way back to the platform. Bondaruk was nowhere to be seen. They half expected him to step from the darkness of one of the tunnels, but nothing moved. Aside from the distant rush of the waterfall, all was quiet.

They stopped at the platform. “I’ll play ladder this time,” Sam said, then knelt down and formed a stirrup with his hands. Remi didn’t move.

“Sam, where’s the chem light?”

He turned. “It’s right over—”

Behind the barrel, the green glow of the chem light shifted.

Sam whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Run, Remi.”

She didn’t argue, but turned and started sprinting back across the cavern toward the tunnels across from the dragon’s teeth.

Ten feet in front of Sam, Bondaruk rose up. Like a cougar attracted by a fleeing hare, he spun, raised his gun, took aim on her.

“No!” Sam shouted. He jerked up the Glock and fired. The bullet missed Bondaruk’s head, grazing past his cheek and slicing through his ear. He screamed, turned, fired. Sam felt a hammer blow in his left side. A wave of white-hot pain rushed through his torso and exploded behind his eyes. He stumbled backward and fell. The Glock clattered across the floor.

“Sam!” Remi shouted.

“Stop right there, Mrs. Fargo!” Bondaruk barked. He came out from behind the barrel stalactite and stalked over and leveled his gun with Sam’s head. “Come back here!” Bondaruk commanded.

Remi didn’t move.

“I said, come back here!”

Remi put her hands on her hips. “No. You’re going to kill us anyway.”

Sam lay still, trying to catch his breath. Through the rush of blood in his ears, he tried to focus on Remi’s voice.

“Not true. You tell me where the columns are and I will—”

“You’re a liar and a murderer, and you can go to hell. You may find the columns without us, but you’re going to have to do it the hard way.”

With that, Remi turned on her heel and began walking. Her unexpected defiance had the desired effect.

“Damn you, come back here!”

Bondaruk turned, bringing the gun to bear on her. Sam took a deep breath, set his jaw, then sat up. He raised the Xiphos above his head and chopped downward. The blade caught Bondaruk at the wrist. Despite having gone unused for two-and-a-half millennia, the Spartan sword still bore enough of an edge to sever bone and flesh.

Bondaruk’s hand came off and dropped to the ground. He screamed and clutched the stump with his opposite hand. He collapsed to his knees.

Remi was there seconds later, kneeling beside Sam. “Help me up,” he said.

“You need to stay still.”

He rolled over, got to his knees. “Help me up,” he repeated.

She did so. Grimacing against the pain, Sam straightened up. He pressed his palm into the bullet wound. “Is my back bloody?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s good. Through and through wound.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call that good.”

“Everything’s relative.”

Sam walked over to Bondaruk, kicked the gun away, then grabbed him by his jacket collar. “Stand up.”

“I can’t!” he gasped. “My hand!”

Sam heaved Bondaruk to his feet. “Mr. Bondaruk, how do you feel about heights?”

“What does that mean?”

Sam looked questioningly at Remi. She thought for a moment, then nodded grimly.

Sam began half dragging, half walking him across the cavern toward the dragon’s teeth.

“Let me go!” Bondaruk shouted. “What are you doing?”

Sam kept walking.

“Stop, stop, where are we going?”

“We?” Sam replied. “We’re not going anywhere. You, on the other hand . . . you’re taking the express elevator to hell.”

EPILOGUE

BEAUCOURT, FRANCE FOUR WEEKS LATER

Remi pulled their rented Citroën into a tree-lined gravel driveway and followed it a hundred yards to a two-story white-stuccoed farmhouse with gabled windows framed by black shutters. She stopped beside the picket fence and shut off the engine. To the right of the house was a rectangular garden, its black soil tilled and ready for planting. A paving-stone walkway led through the gate to the door.

“If we’re right about this,” Remi said, “we’re about to change a girl’s life.”

“For the better,” Sam replied. “She deserves it.”

Following the confrontation in the cave they’d spent two hours making their way back to the entrance, Remi climbing ahead, setting pitons and rock screws and taking as much of Sam’s weight as she could. Sam refused to let her go for help. They’d come down together and they were going back up together.

Once outside, Sam made himself comfortable while Remi sprinted back to the hotel, where she called for help.

The next day they were at the hospital in Martigny. The bullet had missed any major organs, but left Sam feeling like he’d been used as a boxer’s heavy bag. He was kept two days for observation and then released. Three days later they were back in San Diego, where Selma explained how Bondaruk and Kholkov had tracked them to the Grand St. Bernard. One of the security guards sent by Rube’s friend had been approached days earlier by Kholkov and given an ultimatum: install the keylogger or see his two daughters kidnapped. Putting themselves in the man’s shoes, Sam and Remi couldn’t fault the choice he made. The police were left out of it.

The next morning they started the process of returning the Karyatids to the Greek government. Their first call went to Evelyn Torres, who immediately contacted the director of the Delphi Archaeological Museum. From there events moved rapidly and within a week an expedition sponsored by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture was in the cave beneath the Grand St. Bernard lake. On its second day inside, the team found a side cavern. Inside were dozens of Spartan and Persian skeletons, along with their weapons and equipment.

It would be weeks before the expedition would attempt to extract the columns from the cave, Evelyn reported, but the ministry was certain the Karyatids would safely find their way home and eventually be put on display at the museum. Before the year was out scholars the world over were going to have to rethink a good portion of Greek and Persian history.

Hadeon Bondaruk had died never laying eyes on his beloved and elusive Karyatids.

Once Sam was fully on the mend, they returned their attention to the Lost Cellar. According to the legend, Napoleon had ordered his enologist, Henri Emile Archambault, to produce twelve bottles of the Lacanau wine. Sam and Remi could account for only five: one lost by Manfred Boehm and destroyed, based on the Pocomoke shard found by Ted Frobisher; three recovered by them—aboard the Molch, at Saint Bartholomae’s, and in the Tradonico family catacombs in Oprtalj—and finally the bottle stolen by Kholkov from the Marder at Rum Cay and presumably delivered to Hadeon Bondaruk at his estate, an issue the French and Ukrainian governments were working to settle. For their part, Sam and Remi had already turned over their bottles to France’s Ministry of Culture, which had offered an endowment of $750,000 to the Fargo Foundation. A quarter of a million dollars per bottle.

One mystery remained: What had happened to the other seven bottles? Were they lost, or were they somewhere waiting to be discovered, either superfluous parts of Napoleon’s riddle or hidden for their own safety? The answer, Sam and Remi decided, might lie with the man who’d started the legend of the Lost Cellar, the smuggler-captain of the Faucon, Lionel Arienne, whom Laurent had allegedly hired to help stash the bottles.

As far as they could tell, Napoleon had been willing to trust only Laurent with the task, and they’d gone to great lengths to ensure the bottles remained hidden. Why then had Laurent enlisted the help of a random sea captain he met in a Le Havre tavern?

It was a question that would take two weeks to answer. Their first stop was the Newberry Library in Chicago, where they spent three days sorting through the Spencer Collection, home to arguably the largest gathering of Napoleon original source material in the United States. From there they flew to Paris, spending four days and three days respectively at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the defense archives at Château de Vincennes. Finally, armed with a legal pad full of notes, copies of birth and death certificates, discharge documents, and transfer records, they drove west to Rouen, the capital of the Normandy province. There, in the basement of the provincial archives, they found the last link in the chain.

In September 1818 Sergeant Léon Arienne Pelletier, a decorated veteran grenadier in Napoleon’s Reserve Army and subordinate of Arnaud Laurent during the 1800 Italian Campaign, was discharged for reasons unrecorded and returned to his home in Beaucourt, 115 miles east of the port of Le Havre. Two months later he disappeared from Beaucourt, resurfaced in Le Havre with a set of new identity papers, and purchased a three-masted barque named the Zodiaque. The ship cost more than a sergeant could have made in eight lifetimes in the French army. He changed the Zodiaque’s name to Faucon and began smuggling arms and liquor up and down the coast, making modest profits and, astoundingly, not once running afoul of the French authorities. Two years later in June of 1820 Arnaud Laurent walked into a pub and hired Lionel Arienne and the Faucon . Twelve months after that Arienne returned to Le Havre, sold the Faucon, and returned home to Beaucourt, where he slowly but steadily drank and gambled away his fortune.

Why Pelletier/Arienne had chosen to reveal the secret on his deathbed neither Sam nor Remi knew, but it seemed clear that he, Laurent, and Napoleon were the only ones who’d known about the Siphnian Karyatids. Nor would they probably ever know how the three men had found the columns in the first place.

Selma’s completed translation of Laurent’s diary/codebook had solved two smaller riddles: Ten months after he and Arienne picked up the wine from St. Helena, having spent nearly a year secreting bottles around the world, they received word Napoleon had died. Heartbroken, but already enroute to Marseille, Laurent hid three bottles at Château d’If before returning to port. Of the other bottles, he’d said nothing.

As to why Napoleon’s son, Napoleon II, never took up the quest his father had devised for him, this too was a source of despair for Laurent. From the time he returned to France with Arienne to his death in 1825, Laurent wrote Napoleon II dozens of letters begging him to obey his father’s wishes, but Napoleon II refused, stating he saw no reason to leave the comforts of the Austrian royal court for a ‘childish game of hide-and-go-seek.’ ”

Sergeant Léon Arienne Pelletier, it turned out, had one living descendant, a distant cousin named Louisa Foque. She was twenty-one and deep in debt after her parents had died in a car crash a year earlier and left her a thrice-mortgaged Beaucourt farmhouse.

“How do you think she’ll take it?” Remi asked.

“Let’s find out. One way or another her life is about to change.”

They climbed out of the car and walked up the path to the front door. Remi pulled a leather cord and a bell tinkled. A few moments later the door opened to reveal a petite woman with light brown hair and a button nose.

“Oui?” she said.

“Bonjour. Louisa Foque?”

“Oui.”

Remi introduced herself and Sam then asked if Louisa spoke English.

“Yes, I speak English.”

“May we come in? We have some information about your family—about Léon Pelletier. Do you know the name?”

“I think so. My father showed me our genealogy once. Please come in.”

Inside they found a kitchen done in quintessential French Provincial: yellow plaster walls, a lacquered oak dining table, and a sage green sideboard displaying a few pieces of Chinoiserie pottery. Cheerful orange-checkered toile curtains framed the windows.

Louisa made tea and they sat down at the table. Remi said, “Your English is very good.”

“I was studying American literature at Amiens. I had to quit. There was a . . . I had some family problems.”

“We know,” Sam replied. “We’re very sorry.”

Louisa nodded, forced a smile. “You said you have some information about my family.”

Taking turns, Sam and Remi outlined their theory about Pelletier, the Lost Cellar, and their connection to the Siphnian Karyatids. Remi pulled a half dozen newspaper clippings from her purse and slid them across the table to Louisa, who scanned the articles.

“I read about this,” she said. “You were involved?”

Sam nodded.

“I can’t believe it. I had no idea. My mother and father never said anything.”

“I’m sure they didn’t know. Aside from Napoleon and Laurent, Pelletier was the only other person, and he kept the secret up until his death. Even then he didn’t tell the whole story.”

“No one believed him.”

“Almost no one,” Remi said with a smile.

Louisa was silent for half a minute, then shook her head in wonderment. “Well, thank you for telling me. It’s nice to know someone in our family did something important. A little strange, but important still.”

Sam and Remi exchanged a glance. “I don’t think we’ve made ourselves clear,” Sam said. “There are some bottles still unaccounted for.”

Louisa blinked at them. “And you think . . . Here?”

Sam pulled out his iPhone and pulled up a picture of a cicada. “Have you ever seen this anywhere?”

In response Louisa got up and walked to the pot rack hanging above the sink. She pulled down a sauté pan and set it on the table before Sam. The handle was a thumb-sized steel rod. Set into its end was a cicada stamp. It was identical to the one they’d found in Laurent’s crypt.

“My father found that in the attic a few years ago,” Louisa said. “He didn’t know what it was for so he used it to fix the pan.”

Remi asked, “Do you have a basement?”

While their research into Sergeant Pelletier had uncovered a number of surprises, it had also challenged one of their basic assumptions: that Laurent alone had placed the bottles in their hiding spots.

Having spent so much time consumed by the chase they’d begun to think like Laurent and Pelletier, and so it took them only fifteen minutes to find what they’d come for.

In the northwest corner of the basement beneath a wall next to the root cellar they found a block bearing the cicada stamp. As usual, Sam did the prying, Remi the probing. Louisa stood behind them with a flashlight.

Remi slid her hand out of the hole and got to her knees. “Seven,” she said.

“Oh, my Lord . . . ” Louisa breathed. Remi scooted aside so the girl could kneel down and look for herself. “How long have they been there?”

“A hundred and ninety years, give or take,” Sam replied.

“What happens now?”

Remi smiled. “Louisa, you’re rich. You pay off the farm, go back to school, and live happily ever after.”

Hand in hand Sam and Remi walked out the front door to their car. “We got eleven bottles out of twelve,” Remi said. “Not bad.”

“Better than not bad. Think about it: Those bottles survived a trip around the world, the fall of Napoleon, and two world wars. I’d call that miraculous.”

“Good point. I have to say, I feel a little let down.”

“About?”

“The end of the adventure,” Remi said wistfully.

“The end? Not on your life. Patty Cannon’s treasure is still out there, and we’ve got most of the Pocomoke Swamp left to search.”

Remi laughed. “And after that?”

“After that, we pick a spot on the map and go.”